Diesel is dearer: a trucker and his dog at a truckstop on Interstate 80 in Iowa

John van Hasselt · Corbis · Getty

The signs outside XPO Logistics in Long Beach, California — ‘Owner Operators Wanted’— recall the ‘help wanted’ signs outside truck stop diners. The road freight multinational, which acquired French group Norbert Dentressangle in 2015 for more than $3.5bn, is struggling to find new drivers to deliver containers to major retailers such as Walmart and Amazon. Like most US haulage firms, it’s concerned about the national shortage of around 50,000 drivers.

There was a group of people at the gates, preparing for a strike — the sixth in four years: Santos Castaneda and fellow members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the US’s single largest trade union with 1.4 million members as of 2018, including 600,000 drivers, was asking XPO drivers to sign a petition against being classified as independent contractors, and demanding recognition as employees. ‘We’ve launched five lawsuits at the Supreme Court of California,’ said Castaneda. ‘We have even launched an international campaign with our fellow European unionists. But XPO keeps on refusing to consider drivers as employees.’

Most of the 150 drivers at the Long Beach depot have bought their rigs from XPO on lease purchase. Under this system, the driver makes monthly repayments and, after a number of years, barring accidents, owns the vehicle. XPO’s boss Bradley Jacobs (net worth $2.6bn as of 2018) doesn’t like unions. Daniel Duarte, a bus driver who had come to support his XPO colleagues, said: ‘The Teamsters are not recognised in this company. The managers often tell new drivers that we, the Teamsters, are a mafia-based organisation trying to rob [them of] their money. They use the story of the union under Jimmy Hoffa to discourage new drivers from joining. If they think you’re a union leader or even a member, they won’t give you any work. It’s as simple as that. The guys are scared to defend their rights.’

Castaneda pointed to the white line at the gates: ‘If we cross this line, they (...)

(6) This March, a semi-autonomous Volvo belonging to Uber, operating in self-drive mode with a human backup driver behind the wheel, killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. Uber then announced it was suspending tests of self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and Phoenix.

(7) Based in the Southern States, Nikola Motor Company, TuSimple, Peloton, Starsky Robotics and Embark had raised $310m by mid-2018 for the development of systems for driverless trucks (autonomous, platoon, remote-controlled, electric etc).